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May 3, 2008 - April 26, 2008

Monday, June 25, 2007

GOOD OLD CARL. It's just a silly story about an unintentional celebrity gaffe:


Okay. Give Diaz a pass. She got caught up in a Chinese fashion trend. But we've talked here before about the influences fashion can exert in transforming a culture, and the truth is that the personality cult of Mao is thriving in this country as well as China. You don't have to be a movie star to accessorize like Carmen. You can order these little gems right on the Internet:


You know. Just for fun. Or, if your taste in revolutionaries runs closer to home, you can plop yourself down at the keyboard and order this:


Or you can skip Che and adorn yourself with the memory of his boss, like so:


I suppose we could all squint a bit and claim that this is nothing but a sort of nostalgia for the lost Baby Boomer "idealism" of youth. Nostalgia is what the Germans are calling this odd new development in their nation's hospitality industry:


One hotel. No big deal, right? Right? The really good news is that if you think the old Soviet Union was kind of cool in a retro sort of way, you don't have to go to Germany. You can go here and buy things like this:


Time and familiarity render all these images harmless. We begin to associate them with comfortable events in our own experience, and the ideas and facts they reference are gradually reduced to abstractions from which we can deliberately exclude unwelcome complications. Like all contemporary progressive icons, they are more important for the good original intentions we impute to them than for any inconvenient excesses that may lurk underneath.

Finally, we tell ourselves that associating ourselves with these symbols doesn't mean that we're endorsing communism or oppression of any sort. We're actually turning them into the opposite of that. Somehow.

If you suggest to the progressives who think like this that what they're really endorsing is communism, they are truly astonished and scornful. One of the (anonymous) commenters at InstaPunk exemplified this doublethink in his response to a quote he reproduced from one of my Global Warming posts:


Yet the commenter undoubtedly would defend the imposition of a 'Dictatorship of the Scientific Consensus' in order to save the world from Global Warming by edict. Any historical parallels with the disastrous managed economies of the USSR and, say, North Korea don't apply now because the actual history has been peeled away from the rationalist model of absolutist social engineering for the common good. They simply wouldn't repeat any of the worst mistakes of the past, which were probably exaggerated anyway because look at the crazed John Birchers who opposed the communists. They were nuts. They had a blacklist. And what about Vietnam and Iraq and Florida in 2000? You call that freedom and democracy?

Think I'm overstating the degree of self-deluded rationalization involved? Perhaps you haven't seen this item in today's Drudge Report?


I'm betting Putin will find some progressives in this country who think he's scored some major points with this idiotic statement. I can name at least one who thinks that way, and he certainly has a bunch of devoted fans. Here's an excerpt of a review of his latest cinematic demonstration of progressive thought:


Conservatives who write about this kind of disconnects between progressives and reality call it 'moral relativism.' They're right, but in giving it a label that can be easily referenced and repeated, I think they're overlooking the reality they assume we understand. 'Moral relativism' is, in plainer words, a double standard, and a double standard is a comparison test that unfairly values one thing at the expense of another thing.

We can legitimately ask the question, what is it that progressives are valuing too highly and what is it they're not valuing highly enough? The answer to the first part of the question is that they are assigning a ridiculously high value to the 'good' intention of egalitarianism. The rational ideal of a society that does not let any person or group receive more of society's resources than any other outweighs all the costs it might entail. The common good is best served when all men and women are so common that no individual head sticks out of the crowd (unless one brilliant leader is needed to keep it that way.) This is why they lionize Castro despite the universal economic misery his kind of egalitarianism has produced. The fairness of absolutely equal want and deprivation trumps any prosperity that might produce winners and losers.

The answer to the second part of the question is that such a rigid ideal automatically under-values individual liberty and individual human life. In the utterly rational model, people are indistinguishable units. Only the sum of units matters. Individual units are expendable, the more so when they attempt to act as individuals.

Note that any definition of humanitarianism which is prepared to nullify individual worth without counting the individual human cost of "serving the greater good" is, in fact, anti-humanitarian. Progressives of this ilk find it easy to forget or overlook the massive death tolls of left-wing despots because what they care about is not people, but The People, the abstract symbol they create for every community, political faction, ethnic type, regional population, or nation-state they can identify by an umbrella name of some sort. If the equilibrium they define as egalitarianism is absent, all possible means are justified to attain it, including beheadings, mass murder, and absolute suppression of freedom. Egalitarianism is so important, indeed, that it drives them even to identify with populations who disagree completely with everything else they believe in. They can champion the cause of woman-hating, Jew-hating Islamists because the western world prospers while the Islamic haters do not. They can simultaneously despise Hitler -- and compare all their enemies to him -- even as they tacitly espouse Hitlerian anti-semitism, because they're both guilty of anti-egalitarian behavior. Hitler wanted a hierarchical society. The Jews have acquired too much influence, money, and power. The progressives don't even see the contradictions.

That's also how they can look under every mattress and see a threat to vital civil liberties of The People and yet work in dozens of different ways to reduce or eliminate the individual freedoms they find so inconveniently conducive to inequity in the Constitution. They'll fight to the death for the 'common' right of every man, woman, and child to have unrestricted access to any and every kind of pornography. Yet they'll dismiss the Constitution's emphasis on political speech as the single most important kind of speech that must be protected from government infringement.

That's why they'll be outraged today that the McCain-Feingold statute limiting free political speech was watered down by the Supreme Court. And it's why progressive Senator Diane Feinstein over the weekend declared herself on the side of limiting another kind of political speech:


Key word, of course "correct" reporting. Mao would understand. So would Che and Fidel and 'Uncle Joe' Stalin. That's why they're so willing to return the favor and 'forget' the savageries summarized below the fold of this post. Maybe Cameron should give Diane her Mao bag as a gesture of solidarity. She can always get another one via the Internet.

Friday, June 22, 2007

SIGH. People are always saying, "InstaPunk, why can't you be nicer?" They say, "You make fun of Malkin, you're disrespectful to the Blogfather, you go out of your way to irritate Hugh Hewitt and son, you're downright mean to Ace of Spades and Protein Wisdom, you're too snide by half about Sean Hannity, you're actually crazed on the subject of Neal Boortz, and every time you attract the attention of the big conservative bloggers, all you do is piss them off."

True. I really should be nicer. You know. Hell, I've even been confrontational with LaShawn Barber, which is absolutely verboten on the righthand side of the blogosphere. And now I've made an enemy of the Duke of Los Angeles, Patterico. (Look at the comments. He comes back again and again and again. I got under his skin, I guess. You'll note that he never responds to the substance of my critique, only the legalism that I ascribed to him a thought he exemplified without explicitly endorsing.)

What's up with that? Is InstaPunk self-destructive? No. InstaPunk is merely honest. And fed up. Here's who he admires on the right: Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, and Mark Steyn. They're all writers, not bloggers. Most of the righty bloggers are tiresome mediocrities, and we can't help pointing it out when their posts make it too obvious. Thing is, the conservative cause really does need first-rate bloggers. It's a damn shame we don't have them.

Well, except for Glenn Reynolds. That man has a first-rate mind. You can actually see it dancing across the surface of the Internet like some waterbug who's on every watercourse at once without ever sinking. He's a prototype of the glorious future of the human mind -- constantly, dynamically referential, with a nose that pokes into absolutely everything and yet never gets out of joint. I admire him more than I can say. It's just that he's not punk enough. He'd much rather link than fight. Which is his prerogative, of course. That's why I feel compelled to tweak his nose from time to time. He responds creatively to the experience. "Oh," he says, and lays out a new field of references as numerous as ripples on a river.

It's all the other conservative combatants I get tired of. They can dish it out, but they can't take it. They march off to their various little wars, but if you have the gall to disagree, they shut down like a bunch of little girls who can't believe anyone would flout their whims. You can't possibly know how depressing this is to InstaPunk, who is mostly older than they are and who finds it utterly incredible that self-styled conservatives are so hyper-sensitive about being criticized. It's like getting into the ring with a supposedly great prizefighter who starts snuffling and tearing up at the first jab that penetrates his guard.

There are great matters at stake in the world of today. The bloggers on the left are warriors. They're not smart, but they're game. The bloggers on the right are, sad to say, pussies. They have no real taste for combat. They have no stomach for debate. It's a sad state of affairs. They're little girls playing in the pool. And, yes, Patterico, I'm talking about you, too. Quit worrying about whether I was mistaken in ascribing to you a thought you linked and respond instead to the real charge I levied against you -- that you're an ignorant snob on the subject of popular culture. An adult male who doesn't know anything about Michael Schumacher or Annika Sorenstam is a wuss. And I'm tired of the fact that the battle for western civilization rests in the hands of so damn many wusses.

As for the rest of you -- Boortz, Goldstein, Ace, et al -- get over your fragile egos and learn how to fucking write. And the ones who do know how to write, like, say, Dean Barnett, learn how to fight without shrieking every time some prole bloodies your nose. That's why InstaPunk is here. To make you tough enough to go fifteen rounds in the only ring that matters -- the debate over how our nation might best survive the ordeals ahead.

We know our place. We're the right-wing blog the right-wingers hate. Because we recognize mediocrity every time we see it, and we're not afraid to call you on it. So be it.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

AVOIDING THE PROLES. I really don't know what to make of this. Two powerful conservative bloggers have recently posted personal reactions to the Forbes list of top 100 celebrities. Both seem to be taking a certain perverse pride in not knowing a lot of the names on it. Here's Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy:


Then there's Los Angeles luminary Patterico, who gets very specific:


Of the 28 people listed by Patterico, I know 22. And I'm honestly struggling with the statement, implicitly seconded by Patterico, that "popular ignorance about politics probably causes more social harm than academic geeks' ignorance about pop culture."

Whether the statement is true in some absolute sense or not, I can't escape the logic that it would be almost impossible for an "academic geek" to view the question any other way. What we don't know, after all, is obviously less important to us -- and less obviously harmful in our eyes -- than what we do know. In other words, how could Somin and Patterico possibly believe otherwise? There's clearly a huge amount of popular culture they have missed or deliberately ignored. And if Patterico's commenters are any indication, they're not alone.

I have a problem with that. The people on the list have, collectively, a huge impact on who we are as Americans and westerners, for both good and ill. To be ignorant of such a high percentage of them bespeaks a narrowness and rigidity of interests that may be as injurious to political perceptions as an inability to name members of the President's cabinet.

Jay-Z is number nine on the list because he is a cultural archetype of the emerging phenomenon of the rapper as business mogul and social trendsetter. To know nothing of him or 50 Cent suggests a person who hasn't looked much below the surface of the hip-hop gangsta movement that's in the process of transforming American (and European) youth in ways that may prove critical to our future. (And don't claim you've read a book or two about it. If you haven't heard Jay-Z with Linkin Park, you don't know squat about it.)

Others, primarily sports figures to be sure, represent extremely significant accomplishments that don't deserve to be patronized even by 'academic geeks.' Michael Schumacher is possibly the greatest Grand Prix driver of all time. Ditto for Roger Federer in tennis. Annika Sorenstam is almost certainly the greatest woman golfer in history; calling her a "sports babe" actively derides the talent, discipline, character, and perseverance it takes to become the best at anything, which really does include sports in addition to law practice, academic research, and political power. LeBron James may be on his way to breaking the records of Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. I'm certainly no fan of the NBA, but as with the other sports names (including Beckham of World Cup fame and A-Rod of the New York Yankees, for heaven's sake), the only way I can imagine not knowing who he is would be through deliberate refusal to discuss anything with my fellow man but the topics I'm most interested in. I used to rail at the kind of hausfrau who lived with a football fan husband for years without ever learning the first thing about the rules of the game. It struck me almost as an act of malice, her perpetual ignorance requiring more effort to sustain than would a modest learning curve. Now I see that women own no monopoly on that kind of small-mindedness.

Several of the actors on the list are noteworthy for having done some very good work and/or participated in projects that generated social controversies or large popular followings. If you haven't heard of Dakota Fanning, you probably missed an affecting movie called Man on Fire, in which she and Denzel Washington shone. You also missed the aborted release of Hounddog, in which Hollywood suddenly had to reexamine its responsibilities to child actors because of a scene involving implied child rape. If the name Daniel Radcliffe means nothing to you, you're probably one of the few who turned his nose up at the Harry Potter phenomenon, which simultaneously outraged fundamentalists and attracted young people to the reading of books more effectively than a decade of lame public service ads. If you've pigeonholed Vince Vaughn on the basis of a chance encounter with one bad comedy, I have to feel sad that you're probably never going to see his tour de force performance in Return to Paradise, one of the best movies in years about the meaning of personal moral responsibility in the ambiguous modern context.

None of these omissions invalidates an individual person's right to comment on matters political and social, but just how arid and remote is the mindset of a man whose circle of acquaintance includes no old lady fan of George Lopez's TV show, no youngster who forces confrontation with the bizarre persona conveyed by Dane Cook's stand-up comedy routines, no countrified pals who laugh uproariously at Larry the Cable Guy,  no serious sports fan who scratches his head at the Paris Hilton-like self absorption and questionable ethics of golf's enfant terrible Michelle Wie, and no woman or metrosexual open-minded male who gushes enthusiastically about the cooking feats of Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, and Emeril Lagassis?

I would argue that experience of the culture itself -- its highs, lows, and in-betweens in a wide range of human pursuits -- is also an important credential for those who presume to assess where we are as a nation and where we might go from here. In this perspective, our celebrities are not simply the kaleidoscope background of the simple-minded, but a glimpse of potent forces that touch, shape, inspire, lead, and occasionally mislead the people who are ultimately responsible for making decisions in the voting booth. If you know nothing of their interests, and care less, I'm guessing you're darn near as handicapped as the folks who can't name the three branches of the U.S. government.

At the very least, some contact with the popular culture is invaluable in perceiving how it is that the great issues of the day seep into the public consciousness to the extent that they do. If you studiously dismiss sports and television and the movies as perpetually beneath you, I will never listen to a word you have to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the mass media, because these matters are destined to remain perpetually above you.

And if you don't know who Danica Patrick is, you're definitely an old fart and probably a eunuch besides.

So there.

RIGHTS. RIGHT. We first saw this news story on Fox & Friends, where all the hosts agreed that it was ridiculous to object to the noise little girls can make when they're disporting themselves in a swimming pool. Here's the press account.


"Should I muzzle my children?" Uh, if need be. Of course, the court decided otherwise:


Right. Full-grown adults can't possibly be expected to tell kids to pipe down and make it stick. It's just not possible. It hasn't been possible since the 1950s when the last parents who made any attempt to discipline their children were informed by Benjamin Spock and company that it's malicious parenting to make demands of children, to put them in their place as junior and subsidiary members of the family, and to spank them if they fail to learn basic lessons about how to behave in adult surroundings.

Since then, we've all been subjected to the trail of loud noises and broken things left by parents shuttling their unformed larvae through the homes and malls of America. In that time, most parents have learned not to apologize for the casual destruction their little darlings wreak and not even to attempt rectifying the damage they leave behind. Toddlers have become gods, and we're all supposed to accept their unprecedented divinity without question. It's bad form to object.

I object. Children are not angels. Uncorrected and undisciplined, they are monsters. Parents are not ladies-in-waiting. They are continuously responsible for the havoc their reproductive urges might inflict on the world. Little girls can be cute. Their glass-shattering shrieks are not cute. It's possible for children to have fun without requiring the evacuation of an entire city block.

Control your kids, people. The kids will be much the better for it. And so will the rest of us.

UPDATE. This is for J. I grant there's a generation gap here. I thought you might find it helpful to review an older InstaPunk entry from June 1960. Those were cruder times, but they had their compensations.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

EL DORADO. All right. The politicians don't get it. Mostly, the affluent urban and suburban dwellers don't get it, either. You know. The people who aren't from a place but a station in life. Professors, pundits, plutocrats, priests, and, of course, politicians. The protected ones who never encounter Hispanics without advanced degrees. They see the immigration issue as an academic exercise, a philosophical issue, a potential bump in the road in relations with their gardener and/or governess.

This is your chance to show them what's really happening. Send us your digital photos of the Mexicanization of your home town. From all the towns nobody understands to be in peril. From Illinois, Massachusetts, South Carolina, New Jersey, Nebraska, Maryland, Indiana...

There will be no prizes. But we will beg, borrow, or steal enough bandwidth to post pictures from as many places as we hear from. Then we will forward the pictures to everybody involved in the attempt to pass the current immigration bill. Is that simple and clear enough as a strategy? We think it is.

Here's the email address for your photos: punks (at) instapunk.com.

Monday, June 18, 2007

FILM STUFF. There's very little reason to go to the movie theater these days. Most of the movies suck, so much so that the trailers used to advertise them generally serve as superior substitutes for the movies themselves, and theaters have become a contemptuously blatant con job. The screens are small, the ticket prices big, the popcorn and soda prices bigger, the restrooms dirty, the audiences loud and uncouth, and after you creep across the sticky floors to your seat, you are subjected to the one thing you are supposed to be free from in a pay-per-view arena -- commercials. The whole experience seems designed to persuade you that you're a fool for showing up in the first place, but here you are, so what else can we do to bore and annoy you for cold cash?

You don't agree? Well, that's my excuse for what is obviously a late review of a movie masterpiece called "The Children of Men," which I saw over the weekend via cable On-Demand. I have some observations to make, but don't read them until you've clicked on the YouTube file and watched it all the way through.

I'll wait right here while you do that.

Done? Good. Ready to run right out and see it? Not so fast. Here's are some excerpts from the only review -- by Kyle Smith of the NY Post -- that reflected my own experience of the movie:


Actually, the movie's cinematographic artistry serves to undermine its affect because the impossibly long tracking shots inevitably remind the movie buff of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, which was an incomparably superior movie. There, the villain was not a stylized visual backdrop standing in for a vague, deliberately undefined ideological dilemma but something quite specific, human, and recognizable. The Welles tracking shots represented a ruthless hunter endowed with the frightening ability to track and understand his quarry. Cuaron's represent only a kind of helpless, incoherent paranoia that makes even pursuit seem like a nightmare flight from every conceivable conviction and cause but the saccharine ideal of infancy.

Which is all fine, of course. It's acceptable to roll back the entire history of philosophy and declare that the only certainty is the innocence of the unsocialized newborn, but it scarcely merits designation as an idea. It's a default, a kind of automatic reboot that simply ignores reality and postulates the suckling child as superior to all the mentality a suckling child does not possess. Is this what impresses the liberal cognoscenti as thought-provoking, politically astute, and intelligent? Give me a break. There is absolutely nothing in the script which attempts to translate the provocative images of fascism, Islamists, and immigrants into argumentation of any kind. It's all simply a gray, undifferentiated threat to the survival of a baby whose existence has no apparent meaning to the movie's premise but anomaly and, oddly enough, celebrity.

Did you get that? It's a chase movie, a poisoned remake of The Terminator. The protagonist is prepared to die to save the life of the most important being in his universe, except that the nature of that importance is never explained or even hinted at. If all women are sterile, what difference does one baby make? It's not going to save mankind. There's no indication that the mother possesses any unique properties, physically, mentally, or spiritually -- except that she's an illegal immigrant. Which makes her a political straw man and, well, that's all.

Apparently, what's supposed to save us -- what's supposed to inspire us, at least -- is the good intentions of those who fight to keep the baby alive. Well, isn't THAT the liberal paradigm writ large?

In the end, we never learn what the Human Project is. We never learn anything about what the real nature of the conflict between the government, immigrants, and native "resistance" fighters is. I guess we're supposed to assume an allegory that isn't actually delineated, although the chief property of allegory is usually that it is delineated, usually in too much detail. (Perhaps an allegory that refuses to explain itself is the highest of post-modern art.) I infer this means we intelligent liberals are supposed to graft various Bush-isms and Blair-isms onto the script and privately pronounce our own political "Aha!"

Maybe Cuaron could have gotten away with that. Maybe. If he hadn't given himself away with some truly bush league moves. Like casting Michael Caine as a 70-year-old pot-smoking hippie ("Tell Sid he's a 'fascist pig'") who represents the only fully individuated character in the movie. And twice referencing the beloved counterculture sixties with the Stones ballad "Ruby Tuesday,"only not in the original Stones version but in a castrati cover, because in a movie like this Mick's voice somehow sounds too ballsy and vital... And when the credits finally (finally) begin to roll, playing a typically dumbass-Marxist John Lennon song, "Free the People."


It's all too perfect. Instant nihilism. Add tears and stir. A lot of liberal condescension derives from their supposed artistic superiority over the rest of us. There's no question this "film" has an artistic feel, but it has no content. It's interesting and instructive that the libs don't recognize it. For them intellect has become merely a pot-smelling esthetic, which is ipso facto brilliant even when devoid of ideas, rationality, and sense.

It's good information. If you know what to do with it.

POSTSCRIPT. I'll leave it to all of you to divine the relevance of this news item. Al Gore gave an interview in London in which he said:


My sense is that at the moment, Paris Hilton is more important than Global Warming. As parents and their kids discuss Paris Hilton, they may arrive at some personal decisions about how life should be lived that will have great impact on their lives in the next four or five years.

If they obsessed about Global Warming instead, they'd be seeding important lessons about paranoia, but the lessons might not bloom for another ten or twenty years. Think of all the things that might kill large numbers of people before Global Warming ruins Venice as a tourist attraction: another worldwide flu pandemic (overdue), nuclear wars precipitated by Islamists or China (likely), an economic depression caused by destruction of the mideast oilfields or overly aggressive economic controls in the name of slowing Global Warming (likely), an asteroid strike (more likely if we suppress technology in the name of Gaia), a killer quake in California (overdue), et al. Come to think of it, it is a lot easier to forget all the crises for which we might bear some actual responsibility and focus on a phantom future problem instead...

For the time being, though, it's at least possible that American families are seizing the opportunity to prevent tragedies that are very specific, human, and recognizable by discussing what it means to be an irresponsible spoiled brat. I don't think anything Al Gore has to say is more important than that discussion, if it's occurring, and I can't think it's worth truncating such conversations to go see "The Children of Men."

But that's just me.

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